A slightly better-kept secret

This one wasn't as widely rumoured as the Reed/Shenzhen SinoExpo deal, but word of IIR Exhibitions' acquisition of HQ Link's business in Singapore has been rumbling around the market for a few weeks. Lot's of people have looked at Dilys Yong's business; it's an obvious target with strong, specialised trade events in Singapore, China, Vietnam and India. A classic acquisition. The only question you might ask is what took so long for a deal to be done.

This brings together two of the strong ladies of the industry in SE Asia; HQ Link boss and former SACEOS President Dilys with IIR Exhibitions' Rosalind Ng. It will make an interesting combination. It also takes Informa's Asian business of in another direction. Watch this space.

Benefitting from China's broadband boom

Honourable mention for Global Sources we notice in an interesting Investors Business Daily piece on broadband in China. The article's basic point:

China is on pace to pass the U.S. to become the largest broadband market later this year as video, e-commerce and online gaming fuel demand. And the country has just scratched the surface.

It goes on to note:

Shares of Sina, Sohu and Baidu have all done well this year. So have Chinese firms focusing on e-commerce, new media and online gaming. They include Global Sources, (GSOL) Ctrip.com, (CTRP) Shanda Interactive (SNDA) and The9 Ltd. (NCTY)

Kenfair popping along

Hong Kong exhibition organiser Kenfair listed in April 2002 at HK$1. For a while, it traded comfortably, although not dramatically above that. Over the past couple of years, though, it has fallen out of favour and has hovered around the HK$0.70 mark.

As this Yahoo! chart shows, though, things started to move quite dramatically on 11th June. It really popped on 14th and closed yesterday at HK$1.38. That's an 89% pop in three weeks.

What's going on here? Is somebody building a strategic stake or does this just signify new interest in China-related B2B media stocks in advance of Alibaba Group's expected IPO? Global Sources has also seen a healthy run-up in the past couple of months, from a May 1st opening of US$17.34 to a close yesterday of $23.47. It's now trading just shy of its original $24 listing price.

Keep an eye on these. Somebody's making some money somewhere.

Acquisition cost not material

Thank goodness we have the Daily Torygraph on which to rely when it comes to understanding our industry. It's interesting that the newspaper chooses to report on Reed Exhibition's buy-in to the Shenzhen SinoExpo gift fair business.

Given the tortuous negotiations which I feel sure will have accompanied the closing of such a deal, I'm sure both sides will be intrigued to hear that "the cost is understood not to be material". I'll bet it was to them although, to be fair to the Torygraph's Mark Kleinman, probably not in the greater scheme of things for the Reed Elsevier mother ship.

This deal seems to have been quite the worst-kept secret in the Asian exhibitions industry. I've lost count of the number of people who have mentioned it in the past few months. Commercial confidentiality remains a foreign concept across much of China (so, buyers beware!).

The Reed Exhibitions management team must be relieved to generate a UK newspaper story which did not mention defence shows!

Talk nice

Sam Chambers is the Asia/Pacific editor of Seatrade, an independent, UK-based business media company focusing on the shipping and cruise shipping industries. In an e-mail he just described this blog as "excellent".

What alternative do I have then but direct you to the news that his 'baby', Seatrade Asia Online is one year old and thriving. Good stuff.

In the interests of full disclosure (and as I mentioned when I wrote about this a year ago), I should let you know that I first came to Hong Kong 22 years ago to do at least part of the job that Sam is doing now. In those days, I was called Far East Editor. That was supposed to be for 2 years. How time flies!

Labels

The Labels feature in Blogger is handy way with one click of seeing all posts related to a single issue. As you can see further down on the LH side of the page, the system also keeps track of how many times the tag has been used.

I have taken a look as the frequency of tags and find the rankings an interesting indicator of where our attention has wandered over the past year or so:

	Label	Frequency
1	China	115
2	Internet	52
3	India	40
4	exhibitions	31
5	Alibaba.com	23
6	mobile	21
7	blogging	19
8	Japan	18
9	e-commerce	16
10	advertising	14
11	Baidu	13
12	blogs	13
13	Global Sources	13
14	Hong Kong	11
15	magazines	11
16	Google	10
17	UFI	10
18	censorship	9
19	Web 2.0	9
20	CMP	8
21	IPR	8
22	Korea	8
23	Sun Business Nework	8
24	Xinhua Finance	8
25	conferences	7

So, by country it goes:

1. China
2. India
3. Japan
4. Hong Kong
5. Korea

By company, it goes:

1. Alibaba.com
2. Baidu
3. Global Sources
4. Google
5. CMP

By medium, it goes:

1. Internet
2. exhibitions
3. mobile
4. blogging
   
5. magazines

Make of all that what you will!

Good news!

I am just delighted that I will be able to change the layout of the LH column on this blog today and remove the link to the Alan Johnson petition page. He is, I see, finally free.

As a former journalist I, along with so many others in the world, have been watching with great concern over the weeks of captivity for this. What a relief that there appears to have been a 'happy' ending.

Thoughts from Bangkok

Today finds me back in Bangkok which is never a hardship.

I've been keeping an eye on various things over the long weekend including an interesting piece at Seeking Alpha which argues that Xinhua Finance Media is now "grossly undervalued". For those who have been following our coverage of this, you'll know that they've had a real roller-coaster ride since listing. Now, as the piece by Deepak Singh points out, they've "committed US$50 million towards a share buy-back program" because, they say:

We believe that XFMedia’s stock has been unduly punished in recent days and that buying back shares represents an excellent investment at prevailing price levels – especially in light of our strong first quarter results and positive outlook.

Also, in another long-running saga we've been following, the company formerly known as Panpac Media has really severed its links with Bruno Wu's Sun Media group by renaming itself The Lexicon Group. Today, we note, it has announced a Board reshuffle. The Singaporeans are firmly back in charge.

Leadership change in Hong Kong

No, there was no surprise change of plan from Beijing to reappoint Donald Tsang as Chief Executive today, the 10th anniversary of China's resumption of sovereignty over Hong Kong. The news relates to a changing of the guard at AsiaWorld-Expo, the 18 month old exhibition centre at the airport.

Nicolas Borit, the current CEO, will be stepping up to become Managing Director at one the venue's main private sector shareholders, Dragages Hong Kong Limited. His place will be taken by Allen Ha, a [youthful] veteran of the Hong Kong exhibitions indutry. Allen is one of the few people in Hong Kong tall enough to look his former boss and now competitor Cliff Wallace at the HKCEC in the eye. I'm sure the AW-E Board had other considerations in mind as they appointed him!

Thanks to Kenneth Chan over at AW-E for his sterling efforts to get this release to me despite my e-mail systems unexplained desire to eat and destroy several copies of it.

Neither far nor east of where I sit

Thanks to Liam Fitzpatrick over at Time's China Blog for raising one of my pet peeves - the continued practice of many Europeans, particularly my own countrymen in the UK, to refer to Asia as the Far East. From where two-fifths of the world's population sits, it is neither east nor far from anywhere.

This bad, Eurocentric habit derives from a century ago when the colonialists sat in London and Paris trying to divide the world up between them. It's time they gave it up as they had to their colonies.